*Masques de 1831*

Fifteen heads float on a plain ground like casts pulled from life, each labelled below with a clipped name. They are the political class of the July Monarchy, deputies and ministers, modelled by Daumier into jowls, sneers, and squints so exact that contemporaries knew them at once. At dead center hangs the giveaway: a pear. Philipon, who ran La Caricature, had reduced King Louis-Philippe's heavy-jawed face to a poire, and the pun, since poire also means fool, became the regime's mocking emblem. Daumier modelled small clay busts to fix these likenesses, then drew them onto the stone. The result is a recurring gallery of visual types, the same faces returning week after week, exactly how comics would later build a cast. Sheets like this kept La Caricature in perpetual trouble with the censors.